


Lies Are All We Have

by raving_liberal



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: (kinda), Bucky Barnes After Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Hate Sex, Love/Hate, Memories, Memory Loss, Not Really Mission Fic, Past Brainwashing, Red Room (Marvel), not really much plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 22:13:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17394650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: Natasha is resentful that Bucky doesn't remember anything about their time together when he was the Winter Soldier and she was with the Red Room. Bucky is angry that Natasha keeps dragging up a past he doesn't want to remember. The tension between them is reaching critical mass, and now they're stuck together alone on a mission.





	Lies Are All We Have

**Author's Note:**

  * For [supernutellastuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernutellastuff/gifts).



> This is a [BuckyNat Secret Santa](http://fuckyeahbuckynatasha.tumblr.com/secretsanta) gift for supernutellastuff.

They’re leaving for the Swiss Alps at 0300. Natasha complains about having to pack so much gear for the mission, but Bucky honestly doesn’t mind it. Packing means keeping busy, and keeping busy means not talking. They’ll have time enough to sit idly by soon. Too much time, as far is Bucky is concerned, since he’s all about business, and lately, Natasha seems all about the talking.

“You ready, дорогой?” Natasha asks, a hopeful tilt to her eyebrows. 

Bucky answers by aggressively slamming the magazine back into place in the gun he’s holding. Natasha huffs in frustration, and Bucky smiles at her, big and fake. Already starting with the pet names. Yep, this is going to be a fun 72 hours. 

The aging prop plane that’s dropping them over their location is too loud for any real conversation, so that’s a mercy, but Natasha keeps staring at him. Every time he looks up, her eyes are on him, flicking away when she realizes she’s been caught. They do this dance for a while: Natasha devouring Bucky with her eyes until he looks up, at which point her eyes dart away again, over and over. It’s exhausting. 

One time, she realizes Bucky caught her looking, she mouths something at him across the rattle of the plane, and he leans in to hear her as she repeats, “It’s like Vladivostok all over again.”

The look Bucky gives her in response is blank. Vladivostok is meaningless to him, outside his knowledge of its location. 

Bucky gets it, he really does. He looks like someone who used to be important to Natasha, someone she shared some meaningful and intimate moments with. He looks like someone Natasha trusted, whom she might even, to the extent the Red Room allowed, have loved. He looks like that man, but he isn’t that man. He doesn’t remember the Red Room at all. His own memories of Natasha start in Washington, D.C., and are wrapped up in Steve and Pierce and Hydra. Natasha looks at Bucky and sees familiarity and desire. Bucky looks at Natasha and sees blood and fire. 

Natasha shrugs. “It was loud there, too,” she says.

“I’m sure,” Bucky says, hoping that’ll be enough. She just looks disappointed, though. Frustrated. She balls up her fists and rests them on her thighs until they reach the jump point, and then she’s out of the plane first, with him behind her. 

Bucky waits for her chute to open, a barely-there blur against the black and white backdrop of the Alps at night, before he pulls the cord on his. They drift down to the landing point about thirty seconds apart, then spend the next few minutes untangling themselves from the chutes and gear, stowing it in the underbrush. Both of them pull on the winter gear from their packs and put it on over the jumpsuits. The hike to the base is short enough that they’ll make it before dawn. 

Natasha lets Bucky lead the way. He’s bigger and makes a clearer path for her through knee-deep snow. She stays close at his heels, but not too close; misplaced affection aside, she’s the most competent person Bucky has worked of the Avengers and their colleagues. If she had as few memories of him as he had of her, they’d probably get on famously. He would likely even reciprocate the attraction she so clearly feels, but as it is, he feels like he’d be competing with fictional version of himself that she can’t let go of. 

Even with the winter gear, Bucky feels stiff from the cold by the time they reach the base, which is really just a tiny chalet with an excellent vantage point over the valley below. He knocks his boots off against the door frame so he doesn’t track in any snow, hearing Natasha doing the same behind him. Once inside, he makes a beeline for the fireplace. 

Natasha turns out to be an excellent partner for firebuilding. She hands him tinder to feed into the small flames, then logs to build up around it. Soon, the roaring fire begins heating the chalet, and Bucky and Natasha warm up enough to remove their winter gear. Bucky puts a kettle on. The mission is observation, not interception, so they won’t be leaving the chalet for the next three days. They may as well get comfortable. 

“Remember that winter we got snowed in at Sachs Harbour up in the Northwest Territories?” Natasha asks, picking up a blanket from a basket near the fireplace and draping it over her shoulders. 

“No,” Bucky says.

“The snow was so thick that we couldn’t get the doors open,” Natasha says, laughing to herself at the memory. “You ended up digging out enough space around the window for me to climb out. Remember?”

“No, I don’t remember.”

“I’m sure you must,” Natasha says, barreling on with false bravado. “I got frostbite on my fingers, and when I got out, it was snowing too hard for me to figure out our coordinates, so I climbed right back in.”

Bucky frowns. “Hmm.”

“And you called me малышка and rubbed my hands until—”

“I don’t, I told you! I don’t remember!” Bucky yells at her. “And I don’t want to remember.”

“Gee, thanks,” Natasha says, her face gone cold and mean.

“You know what I mean,” Bucky says.

“Do I?” Natasha asks. “Because according to you, I don’t know you at all, so how could I possibly know what you mean, other than you hate the idea of ever having been with me.”

Bucky sighs and paces across the chalet—only eight paces from one wall to the other—a few times before he can look at her. “I know you read my files.”

“I didn’t need to look at your files to know you,” Natasha says. “I’ve known you since I was seventeen.”

“You knew the Winter Soldier, not me.”

“They’re both you,” Natasha insists.

“I don’t want them to be,” Bucky says.

Natasha doesn’t respond. She gets up to take the kettle off the tiny stove and pour herself a cup of tea, then settles herself onto the tiny sofa facing the chalet’s wide windows, which overlook the valley. She tucks her feet under herself and wraps the blanket tighter. After a long while, Bucky sits on the other end of the sofa, and they watch the sunrise over the valley in silence. 

“We should get the video equipment set up,” Natasha says. 

“I’ll do it,” Bucky says. 

“Sure you remember how?” 

“What is your problem?” Bucky snaps at her. “I’ve read your file, too, by the way, and I would think you of all people would appreciate not wanting to remember your past.”

“I guess that’s the difference between us, then,” she says. “I don’t want to forget it. I want to remember it and learn from it.”

“Well, they weren’t wiping your memories after every mission. I didn’t get the luxury of learning from my mistakes.”

Natasha goes pale, like she’s been slapped. She stares down at her empty mug, and finally says, in the softest voice, “I hate you.”

“Yeah, well… I’d probably hate me too, if I were you,” Bucky says.

They don’t speak again Bucky sets up the video equipment, nor do they talk to each other for the rest of the day about anything other than the mission. They take turns with the long-range binoculars, one of them watching and calling out data, the other logging them in the binder they’d brought with them. Bucky does both while Natasha breaks for lunch, then they swap out, Bucky eating quickly while Natasha stares through the binoculars and scribbles notes in the binder. 

When the sun starts to set, they put away the binoculars and switch the camera to infrared for the evening. The chalet has one bed up in the loft, so Bucky goes about bedding down on the sofa. Natasha watches him as he lies down and pulls a blanket on top of himself, then she climbs up the ladder to the loft. He can still feel her eyes on him from up there.

“Get some sleep,” he says, up into the darkness.

Natasha doesn’t answer at first, long enough that Bucky thinks she’s fallen asleep already, then he hears the soft inhale that precedes talking. “You could pretend.”

“Hmm?” Bucky asks, trusting she can hear him.

“You could pretend you remembered,” Natasha says. 

“Why?” Bucky asks. “You would know it was a lie.”

“Sometimes lies are all we have, малыш.”

Bucky sighs. “Maybe so.” He takes a few long, slow breaths, letting his thoughts circulate. “You could pretend, too, you know.”

“How so?”

“You could pretend you _didn’t_ remember me. Him.”

Natasha laughs softly. “I could try, I suppose.”

“Goodnight, Natasha.”

“Goodnight, любимый.” 

The next day proceeds the same way as the day before, though the nature of the tension between them has shifted. Natasha drinks tea, and they trade off binocular duty, and they don’t really talk much. She brushes against Bucky a few times, seemingly by accident, though he knows she does little, if anything, accidentally. He tries not to bristle too much when her arm slides against his. He bites down on an angry remark when she touches her hand to his hip with casual familiarity as she’s passing by him to the kitchen. 

They could pretend, either one of them, but odds are, they won’t.

That night, Bucky beds down on the sofa again, and Natasha watches him from the loft, but that night, they don’t say anything at all. Bucky listens to Natasha’s breathing settle into the soft rhythm of sleep. She sounds so fragile and warm, and he asks himself _why_ he can’t pretend. He lies awake for hours feeling furious at her for suggesting he _could_ pretend, and at himself not being able to. 

Their last day in the chalet, they’re both wary and on edge. The air between them crackles with static. When they get too close, electricity bridges the gap and startles both of them back to awareness. They go about the business of surveillance, Natasha’s voice a little rough when she reports on the things she’s observed, Bucky’s grip on the pen too tight as he notes them in the binder. He’s aware of every little move she makes. The air ripples around her as she combs a stray lock of hair away from her face. 

“Stop it,” he finally tells her, when they’re about to start their lunch break.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Yes, you are,” Bucky says. “Stop.”

“I’m doing the job, James. I thought that’s what you wanted,” Natasha says, and she has to gall to not even look like she’s faking the innocent expression on her face.

“I’m not him,” Bucky says.

“But I’m still her,” Natasha says. “You forgetting won’t change that.”

“Goddammit, Natasha, I swear—”

She cuts him off with her mouth on his, and he doesn’t push her off like he might have two days ago. Both her hands thread into his hair, twisting and tugging. She’s so much smaller than him that he’s bent over with it, just trying to keep his mouth on hers. He shouldn’t do this. This history she remembers, it isn’t with him. This is false promises based on lies and play-pretend.  
She bites his lower lip, and he no longer gives a fuck.

Bucky scoops her up with both his hands under her thighs, and walks forward until her back hits the wall. She lets out a startled breath and bites at his mouth again, her fingers pulling mercilessly at his hair. He squeezes the solid muscle of her thighs and presses her harder into the wall. The video equipment continues to record the valley unmonitored.

“I know you’re not him anymore,” Natasha says against Bucky’s lips.

“Good,” Bucky says. He mouths down her face to her neck, nipping at her pulse point. She wraps her legs around him and tilts her head back. Bucky sucks on the delicate skin on her throat until it darkens.

“He was always gentle,” she says. “Careful.”

“Good for him,” Bucky says, and starts pulling at her clothing. Maybe it says something about Natasha’s flexibility, or maybe it’s the ghost of a dance their bodies have done together in the past, but they manage to get their pants off without significant disentanglement from each other. 

“I hate you for not being him,” Natasha says, then she moans as he slides into her. She’s hot and wet and perfect and _familiar_. He hates her a little bit for that, too.

Natasha’s legs hitch up higher on Bucky’s back as he fucks her fast and hard against the wall. Her face flushes, and he watches the pink creep down and disappear into her shirt. Her silky thighs tremble against his sides. 

“This doesn’t change anything,” Bucky says to her.

“Oh shut up,” she responds, and cants her hips forward in a hard snap. Bucky presses his forehead to hers and holds it there, letting their bodies move, wishing he could untangle all the history between the two of them to make this something simple and easy. Wishes he could just want her, just have her, without the echo of someone he hated being ringing in her head.

“Natasha. Natalia. Oh _fuck_ ,” Bucky whispers, and her body shakes even harder. She throws back her beautiful head, eyes closed, sweat at her temples, and lets out a loud cry as she comes hard around him. After a few more thrusts, he follows, pressing his weight into her, holding her up against the wall.

They breathe heavily for a while, his temple pressed to hers, then he slips out of her. Her legs unlock from around him and hit the floor. It’s awkward suddenly, both of them flushed and sticky, fumbling for their pants. He doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t hold her to him like instinct suggests he should. She doesn’t cling, doesn’t cry or profess her affection. They pull their pants back on like adults and finish the mission. 

It isn’t love. It isn’t hate. It isn’t memory, but it’s something.


End file.
